Adams Family Correspondence, volume 12
I have no Letter this Week and begin to fear that your Respect to our late P. has laid a foundation for a Sick Spring and Summer. Sometimes too I am jealous of unfair Play in the Post office to prevent me from hearing from you at the most critical Period of my Life.
The public Papers must give you an Account of Proceedings, which I am wholly unable to describe.1
What Judgment is form’d of my Part in the late Transactions, by my Friends or my Ennemies, I know not. There is a Reserve in both, beyond my comprehension.
17The P. and Mrs W. go off this morning for M. Vernon. Yesterday afternoon he came to make me his farewell Visit and requested me in his own Name and Mrs Ws. to present “their Respects” to Mrs Adams. I believe, that I envyed him more than he did me: and with Reason.
The House is to be cleared and cleaned, and I am to go into it on Monday next, if possible. I shall make a Small Establishment for myself for the present and wait yur Advice for Ulteriour Arrangements.
It is now generally understood that I am to go home before Midsummer and bring my Family in October.
The Business of all kinds and Writing particularly out of the habit of which I have been so long, presses upon me very severely and would endanger my health if I did not make Conscience of riding every day.
Mrs Cushing will call upon you and give you an Account of what they call The Inauguration. It is the general Report that there was more Weeping than there has ever been at the Representation of any Tragedy. But whether it was from Grief or Joy, whether from the Loss of their beloved President, or from the Accession of an unbeloved one. or from the Pleasure of exchanging Presidents without Tumult or from the Novelty of the Thing, or from the sublimity of it, arising from the Multitude present, or whatever other cause I know not. one Thing I know I am a Being of too much Sensibility to Act any Part well in such an Exhibition. Perhaps there is little danger of my having Such another Scene to feel or behold.
The Stilness and Silence astonishes me. Every body talks of the Tears, the full Eyes, the streaming Eyes, the trickling Eyes &c but all is Enigma beyond.— no one descends to particulars to say Why or wherefore, I am therefore left to Suppose that it is all Grief for the Loss of their beloved.
Two or three Persons have ventured to whisper in my Ear that my Speech made an agreable Impression
I have ventured to Say Things both in that Speech and in my farewell address to the senate, So open to Scoffs and Sarcasms that I expected them in Abundance. I have not yet Seen any. The more may come. I have been So Strangely Used in this Country. so belied and so undefended—that I was determined to say some Things, as an Appeal to Posterity. foreign nations and future times will understand them better than my Ennemies, or friends will own they do. 18 The Vanity and Egotism, which is so apparent or at least to seeming may be pardoned for what I know lest Satirical Reflections on it should provoke Some one to produce Proofs that if it is Egotism it is no Vanity.
My dear Wife your Society is invaluable to me and yet I cannot enjoy it, before July I fear. All will depend upon public Events. I shall come to you as soon as possible.
I am with an affection that can end only / with my Life and I hope not then, Your / faithful Friend & Husband
RC (Adams Papers); internal address: “Mrs A.”; endorsed: “March 9th / 1797.”
JA’s inaugural address first appeared in special supplements of the Philadelphia Gazette and Philadelphia American Daily Advertiser, 4 March. Other newspapers later reprinted the speech with accounts of the inauguration but offered little comment on the address itself; see, for example, the Philadelphia Gazette of the United States, 6 March. One exception was the Philadelphia Aurora General Advertiser, 11 March, which judged the address patriotic, conciliatory, and “completely satisfactory to the candid and dispassionate. It is the address of a fellow citizen, who will not deign to become the President of a Party, but the President of the United States.” It would be published in Boston from 15 March; see, for example, the Boston Columbian Centinel, 15 March, and the Massachusetts Mercury, 17 March.
a.March 11. 1797
Yesterday only I recd yours of March 1.— am surprized you should have recd none from me from 11. Feb.
I have written never less than once a Week, seldom less than twice and 9 Weeks out of 10, three times, ever Since I left you. The Roads or some irregularity of the Post must have occasioned your disappointment.
I hope you will obtain Mr Mears, but I must leave every Thing to you— The Load of Business that now compells my Attention every day is such that I cannot think a moment about my farm
Mr Maund writes me that he has sent me a Barrell of seed oats of a superiour quality, to Boston by a Captain Allen, who was to Sail beginning of March, from Virginia1
The Family is gone— Mr Lear and Mr Dandridge remain—2 But it is a great Work to arrange and clean the House— I cant get into it before the middle of next Week
I hope Billings will Sow the Barley and Grass seed well— what will become of my Meadow Cornfield I know not.— However I must leave that, and all the rest to you & I could not trust it better.
19My Heaps of Compost will suffer I fear. I sent you the last Letters from our Sons.3
My Aunt Veseys death was unknown to me am very glad you went to the Funeral.
The Feast that Succeeded was one of those Things which are not to my Taste. I am glad you went— I went too.— But those Things give offence to the plain People of our Country, upon whose Friendship I have always depended. They are practised by the Elegant and the rich for their own Ends, which are not always the best. If I could have my Wish there should never be a Show or a feast made for the P. while I hold the office.— My Birth day happens when Congress will never Sit: so that I hope it will never be talked of.4 These are hints entre nous. I am, my dear / est friend ever yours
Washington has at last denounced the forged Letters.5
RC (Adams Papers); internal address: “Mrs A”; endorsed: “March 11th / 1797.”
On 13 Feb. John James Maund wrote to JA to offer the oats and at the same time presented his respects to AA and to his “friend” TBA (Adams Papers). It is unclear if the oats were received, although
AA informed JA on 31 March, below, that William Smith was making inquiries. Maund (d. 1802) was a Virginia attorney who had spent time in Philadelphia in 1794, where he apparently made the acquaintance of the Adamses (Washington, Papers, Presidential Series
, 15:668).
Tobias Lear, George Washington’s former secretary, lived in Washington, D.C., at this time but had come to Philadelphia in Feb. 1797 to help the Washingtons close their household. Bartholomew Dandridge Jr. also stayed behind to help settle the Washingtons’ affairs, remaining in Washington’s employ until his departure for The Hague as secretary to William Vans Murray (vol. 11:528; Washington, Papers, Retirement Series
, 1:23–25).
For the letters JA forwarded to AA, see AA to JA, 12 March, and note 1, below.
Public celebrations for JA never reached the level accorded to Washington. Celebrations of JA’s 30 Oct. birthday, which throughout his public life generally fell during the congressional recess, were held only in central New England, most prevalently during the Quasi-War (Simon P. Newman, Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic, Phila., 1997, p. 74). In 1798 JA and AA declined an invitation to celebrate Washington’s birthday in Philadelphia; for AA’s comments on the subject, see her letter to Mary Smith Cranch, 15 Feb., and note 4, below.
During the Revolution the British attempted to undermine Washington’s command of American forces by publishing a series of forged letters, allegedly captured after the fall of Fort Lee in Nov. 1776, that exposed Washington’s pro-British sympathies and low opinion of American troops. Largely discredited at the time of their publication in London in 1777 and in the United States in 1778, a pamphlet of the letters was reprinted in Philadelphia in 1795 in the midst of political furor over the Jay Treaty. Washington waited until the end of his public career to denounce the letters, describing them as “base forgery” in a 3 March 1797 letter to Timothy Pickering. Believing their original intent was “to strike at the integrity of the motives of the American Commander in Chief” and more recently that “another crisis in the affairs of America having occurred, the same weapon has been resorted to, to wound my character and deceive the people.” Pickering submitted Washington’s letter to the Philadelphia Gazette of the United States, which printed it on 10 March. It was then widely reprinted; see, for example, the New York Daily Advertiser,
20
13 March, Massachusetts Mercury, 21 March, and the Charleston, S.C., City Gazette and Daily Advertiser, 29 March (Worthington Chauncey Ford, The Spurious Letters Attributed to Washington, Brooklyn, N.Y., 1889, p. 9–11, 20–21; Stewart, Opposition Press
, p. 531–532; Letters from General Washington to Several of His Friends, in June and July, 1776, Phila., 1795, Evans, No. 28969; Pickering, To the Editor of the United States Gazette, no imprint, 1797, MWA, Evans, No. 33072).